The answer is: he didn't understand the business. There tens if not hundreds of competitors, and yet the tour operators still taking bookings over the phone. That tells you a lot.
The market is ruthlessly efficient. If something has a low barrier to entry, like his idea, then it's absolutely 100% guaranteed that someone else has tried it. Would-be founders need to do a brutally honest assessment of why they are going to succeed where others have failed.
> If something has a low barrier to entry, like his idea, then it's absolutely 100% guaranteed that someone else has tried it
Most founders of succesful businesses Ive met - especially ones who weren't absolutely outstanding talents in their fields - created businesses with very low barriers to entry yet that no one had tried. But all of them were three-dimensional ones. I get that this is HN so the assumption is tech, but in the offline world or at least the combination of tech with a big dose of offline (bigger than the one in this article) a low entry barrier says just about nothing about potential.
Not mentioned in the article: the market which this person was trying to enter is saturated with competition. These tour operators are bombarded with pitches for these things every day, and of course every one of them wants a cut of their hard earned revenue. It's a bad deal for a small business owner. They take all the risk, invest all the capital, while some SV firm comes along and kindly offers to scoop all the cream (margin) off the top.
So, this business failed due to a combination of lack of knowledge of the market and were not addressing a truly burning need for customers.
I also want to say that an industry doing things on paper and in person isn’t always in need of a high tech overhaul.
Why would a scuba shop want to take on the burdens and issues of your tech solution? They are running a shop already. I don’t imagine they planned on becoming billionaires. Maybe they just like scuba and want to facilitate other people enjoying it too.
Telling ann established business owner you have a “better way” to do something is so arrogant. Not everything has to be hyper technologically advanced.
I think this really is the most important point. They could've figured this out in a much lower-budget way by having conversations before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pitching these business owners before making the app (or with a much lighter-weight version like a Shopify store) was clearly the right move, but you've got a founder who didn't want to sell (which is maybe as big of a hurdle as the saturated market).
And now that I think about it, I would bet they could've gotten 95+% of the functionality they needed with a Shopify store that cost a few hundred bucks per month and maybe some overseas VAs.
To add a marketplace is doubly hard, you have to acquire both demand and supply sides, running sales and marketing to 2 different groups. Targeting tourists/last minute is even harder because you need to be there at right place at right time. To make matters worse, there is a plethora of options for tourist, speak to locals or google or TripAdvisor
I don't think thats really Postgres running in the browser, it's more a "compatible" reimplementation of Postgres in TypeScript. Obviously impressive in its own right!
For those that can’t access the article, here’s the key sentences:
“In recent weeks, however, more data has become available, and it suggests that the true picture is less alarming. Yes, Delta has increased the chances of getting Covid for almost everyone. But if you’re vaccinated, a Covid infection is still uncommon, and those high viral loads are not as worrisome as they initially sounded.
How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.”
Amazon's co-mingling of inventory facilitated large-scale theft by enabling stolen goods to be sold along-side legitimately sourced items. One has to wonder: at what point does Amazon's reluctance to improve supply-chain integrity venture into the territory of aiding and abetting crime?
This feature is a big plus for parents. It's hard to appreciate how hard it is to protect kids online if you don't have kids yourself. I get that those without kids will find it intrusive, but it sounds like these feature are opt-in.
I consider iOS to be the best platform for kids today. That said, Apple: if you're listening: please tighten up parental controls around time limits and re-loading apps!
I have another idea to protect kids, let's say a kid is moving on a highway and it's speed according to a phone gps is 66mph in 60mph zone, wouldn't be it wise to notify the police about his parents braking a law and endangering a child? There are so many kids dying every year on our roads.[/s]
There's another really difficult challenge for hearing-impaired people not mentioned here: it's mentally exhausting to follow online meetings, even with captions. Hearing impaired people have to very intently while also trying to make sense of lagging/imperfect captions, and that's a high cognitive load to sustain for long periods.
Accented English is particularly challenging, because otter.ai (used in Zoom) has very poor accuracy with the most common accents we encounter in software engineering.
Absolutely. This was actually something my team brought up—it was much more exhausting than usual, because it places such a heavier mental load on everyone. In my case at least, it’s still better than lip reading in large in-person meetings.
This is also the case in US. Contract formation requires that the signing party has an opportunity to read the contract. If the contract is subject to litigation and the signing party can show they did not have an opportunity to read it, the contract will be thrown out. It is especially frowned upon to misrepresent the contract ("Don't worry, it's just some routine boilerplate") and not provide a copy before the person signs it.
Not sure why you're downvoted. It probably has to do with the implication that it might be a government or a private company that is doing the logging, but that doesn't need to be the case. We could develop a culture where we record everything around us and store the recording on our own devices, accessible only by us.
That episode was good, but the book/film The Circle I think covered this type of scenario better (even if the movie adaptation did leave a little to be desired)
I don't understand the EULA part. Are you saying that if a company sells eyeglasses with 24/7 audio and video recording to an microSD card, then that company would have an interest in adding a EULA that prevents using their own devices in a court case against someone else? Or are you saying that a hospital would have an EULA that prevents one from using any recording one might coincidentally hold of interactions with them in a court case?
The company won't be selling a 24/7 microSD recorder, it'll be selling a 24/7 cloud recorder, for the usual bullshit reasons that are ostensibly about convenience, but in reality are about securing recurring revenue. Since you won't be using a product but a service, there will be an EULA, and the company may not want their data (at this point it isn't your data anymore) trawled in random court cases.
Might not, but EULA may stipulate that breaking it will cause termination of account and deletion of your data. It would be similar to forced arbitration clause, as far as I understand them - i.e. it's not that you can't sue the company, it's that you'd better not, if you want to retain your account.
That's good for the other places (and I'm happy to live in one), but here we're talking strictly about the United States, as the article pertains to US federal government matters.
The market is ruthlessly efficient. If something has a low barrier to entry, like his idea, then it's absolutely 100% guaranteed that someone else has tried it. Would-be founders need to do a brutally honest assessment of why they are going to succeed where others have failed.